For those that want to keep an eye on it:
[quote]dollarbill44 wrote:
I’m skeptical that anything will come of it. I’ve been running similar experiments under my house for about 9 years now. I dug out a circular tunnel that is approximately 100 meters in circumferance. Several years ago, I kidnapped a set of identical twins from the Jamaican Olympic track team. I outfitted them with special helmets with little baskets on the front, in which I place whatever items I will be colliding in that experiment.
I have them run around at full speed in opposite directions, running head-on into each other. The only time that was really exciting was when I had a small oxygen tank on one and a small acetylene tank on the other. I had to get out the cutting torch after that one, but their burns were only minor as it set off the halon extinguisher system. The twins took a little while to recover, however, since one of them was without oxygen for over 4 minutes(ironically the one who carried the oxygen tank).
DB[/quote]
i really want to come to your house now.
[quote]LowfatMatt wrote:
For those that want to keep an eye on it:
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/ [/quote]
HAHHAHAHAHHA! Awesome.
Edit:
That fix was QUICK - I’ll give you that.
[quote]LowfatMatt wrote:
For those that want to keep an eye on it:
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/ [/quote]
awesome.
[quote]Bauer97 wrote:
EstoVir wrote:
Seriously why risk this shit? Can’t they do this on the moon or something.
If it opens up a massive black hole, I’m pretty sure we are equally fucked if it occurs anywhere within our galaxy, let alone on the f’ing moon a stones throw away from us.[/quote]
There is an incredibly dense region of dark matter in our galaxy that most scientists now believe is a massive black hole. It’s fairly quite but it is there.
Not to worry though as the Andromeda galaxy is going to consume our galaxy in about 2.5 billion years or so.
Space = brutal
[quote]LowfatMatt wrote:
For those that want to keep an eye on it:
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/ [/quote]
But if it does destroy the Earth, the page won’t ever be updated. 
[quote]AngryVader wrote:
LowfatMatt wrote:
For those that want to keep an eye on it:
But if it does destroy the Earth, the page won’t ever be updated. :D[/quote]
Ironic, eh?
from Gregg Easterbrook’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback (TMQ) column on ESPN.com’s Page 2:
"…the most powerful atom smasher ever, the Large Hadron Collider, is scheduled to be activated near Geneva. Let’s hope much of the Swiss-French border does not vanish into a singularity. Let’s hope the device – its miles of underground tunnels, encircled by mysterious high-tech gizmos, are designed to simulate hypothesized conditions of the Big Bang – does not inadvertently trigger a Lite Bang, taking our solar system along with it. TMQ still cannot fathom why society should spend many billions of dollars or euros to construct advanced atom-smashers whose main purpose is to provide employment for physicists, and which engage a chance, however small, of igniting general calamity. Let’s hope you do not see swirling flashes of energy, followed by mysterious high-tech gizmos being sucked into a strange vortex, followed by the camera failing.
Over the summer the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN owing to an old French name, announced that activating the huge collider will be “no threat to Earth or the universe.” The universe is safe from European government officials – whew! CERN’s safety claim is based on this analysis, and most likely the analysis is correct. But the study that OKs the CERN project was conducted by – CERN. Why do I not find this reassuring? Recent headline from Science Daily: “If the Large Hadron Collider Produced a Microscopic Black Hole, It Probably Wouldn’t Matter.” A black hole inadvertently formed in Switzerland “probably” wouldn’t matter. Why do I not find this reassuring?
TMQ’s previous anti-atom-smasher item noted that in order to arm-twist Congress into approving funds for particle accelerators, lobbyists confuse limited-science-literate representatives and senators into thinking the accelerators have something to do with national defense or international competitiveness. The fiscal 2008 federal budget, enacted last fall, awarded the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, which runs an atom smasher, $320 million for 1,940 employees – amounts that seem plenty generous, considering Fermilab hasn’t had a major discovery since 1995, when researchers there found the “top” quark. Rather than be grateful for $320 million in tax-funded handouts, Fermilab lobbied Congress about how horrible it was that its program wasn’t getting even higher subsidies. In July, a nongermane rider on the latest Iraq war borrowing bill tossed an additional $29.5 million to the Fermi accelerator.
So now average people are being hit up for about $350 million to run the Fermi facility this fiscal year, though the accelerator is unlikely ever to produce any knowledge of tangible value to taxpayers, and in the past decade hasn’t even produced much abstract knowledge. Fermilab’s accelerator yielded significant abstract knowledge in the 1970s and 1980s, when the device was staging experiments not previously attempted. Now the machine seems to have found what it is capable of finding, but being a government program, funding continues long after the original reason for the program has been fulfilled. Fermilab does play some role in raising public awareness of science, but on that point, federal appropriations are much more urgently needed for high school science and math teachers than for maintaining an expensive facility that is past its prime. The Fermi accelerator gradually evolved from interesting experiment into a boondoggle that supplies cushy jobs for physicists and politically connected contractors. The new Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland ups the ante by being a boondoggle from day one!
Creepy afterthought: One of the key puzzles in cosmology is the origin of gamma-ray bursts, extremely powerful flares of energy from deep space. Astronomers speculate that gamma-ray bursts may be caused by collapsing stars or by some remnant of the Big Bang process; TMQ has speculated they may be the muzzle flashes of horrific weapons being used in distant wars. Reader Adam Wolbach of Pittsburgh, a grad student at Carnegie Mellon University, adds this creepy possibility: gamma-ray bursts are the evidence of alien civilizations turning on advanced supercolliders, and promptly winking out of existence."
Who’s got dibs on Bosons? I’m going to go with Hawking and say no.
I hope it does open up a black hole! I am really curious to know what it would be like to get sucked into one. I know you get “spaghetti-fied” and all that shit, I just want to experience it!
Who really knows what happens? I mean, you could get blasted into another universe like in the game half life! That would be so bad ass! Or maybe you get held in some kind of galactic stasis, only to be released after the black hole dies, and free to roam the universe for eternity!
I know it won’t happen, but a guy can imagine…
Imagine after all this time…all the years of fundraising and planning…all the controversy about opening up intergalactic voids and unspeakably destructive forces…the ethical debate about “playing God”…the billions upon billions of dollars and cutting through red tape…after ALL this build-up…they find that the particle collider doesn’t work because some half-witted employee spilled his McDonald’s milkshake on it??
It would certainly make life more interesting if something along the lines of Half-Life 2 occured.
They should take a world wide vote on whether this should go through.
Who gave these guys the go ahead to do something that could end our shit?
[quote]AngryVader wrote:
LowfatMatt wrote:
For those that want to keep an eye on it:
But if it does destroy the Earth, the page won’t ever be updated. :D[/quote]
Fuck you, Schrodinger’s cat!
That was awesome.
I predict that Poliquin’s body fat levels will rise ABOVE 10%, making him a frequent visitor of Kate Harding’s blog. Hell, even a guest author.
Oh, and Surge Workout Fuel will be released. Free, but shipping will be so expensive that none of us can afford it.
Ah, the rabbit (black) hole…
[quote]msd0060 wrote:
They should take a world wide vote on whether this should go through.
Who gave these guys the go ahead to do something that could end our shit?[/quote]
Hawking has a $100 bet going that it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to(find higgs boson). If Stephen Hawking says it’s ok, I’m not worried.
But if he is wrong, it’s not like we will be around long enough to know it.
But what a way to go.
“Hey, how’d you die?”
“Oh, me? I was on Earth when they turned on the L.H.C.”
“Blackhole, huh?”
“Interestingly, no. It gave everyone superpowers.”
" . . . and you died being super-heroic?"
“No. We destroyed the material universe seven seconds later.”
[quote]Vash wrote:
But what a way to go.
“Hey, how’d you die?”
“Oh, me? I was on Earth when they turned on the L.H.C.”
“Blackhole, huh?”
“Interestingly, no. It gave everyone superpowers.”
" . . . and you died being super-heroic?"
“No. We destroyed the material universe seven seconds later.”[/quote]
HAHAHAHA! So true!
We have about a billion times better chance of being obliterated by an asteroid in the next hour than we do the earth disappearing into a black hole opened by the LHC.
What Donut said.